As a writer, editor and commentator Paddy McGuinness could irritate or hearten, depending on the type of day you or he were experiencing. But most importantly, he could make you smile with utmost pleasure at the sheer elegance of his way with words. Rationalists and the pursuers of excellence will miss him dearly. Lesser minds won’t.
Fine obituary by Mark Juddery.

It’s the tenth anniversary of that other big lie related to fellatio. It will be interesting to see whether the US mainstream media — with its sickening adoration of fossilised feminist, compulsive liar and hypocrite extraordinaire, Hillary Clinton — will pay any attention to the stained dress milestone.

January 26, 1998: Clinton denies affair with intern
President Clinton has strongly denied allegations that he had an affair with a 24-year-old former White House aide.
He also rejected accusations that he asked her to lie about the relationship on oath.

Well, if they let it slip, we can always remind them of another tenth anniversary coming up on August 17:

After repeatedly denying an inappropriate relationship with Ms Lewinsky, the president finally acknowledged the affair in a televised speech to the grand jury.

I can’t believe this scumbag and his skank of a spouse are serious contenders to again lead the free world.

Now we’re approaching the end of the Rudd government’s honeymoon, lefty institutions like Fairfax are forced to a vital decision: either embrace a new reality or become even more alienated from the mainstream.
The Sydney Morning Herald today demonstrates it has realised it may not be useful to be always out on the extremes with green mythmakers.

THE Hawke government finance minister Peter Walsh has warned the Rudd Government that cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent by 2050 would send Australian living standards back to the Middle Ages.

Yes, I know it’s not much. But when did you last see the bolshie media even accept there might be a counter argument to manmade global warming? Let alone publish such a point.
Can’t wait for the green religionists’ heresy accusations in the letters columns.

An early favourite for the Darwin Awards, for those who advance humanity by removing themselves as early as possible from the gene pool:A WOULD-be suicide bomber fell down a flight of stairs and blew himself up as he headed out for an attack in Afghanistan, police say.

In a case with statewide significance, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office is pursuing a Sunnyvale couple under a little-known California law because redwood trees in their backyard cast a shadow over their neighbor’s solar panels.
Richard Treanor and Carolynn Bissett own a Prius and consider themselves environmentalists. But they refuse to cut down any of the trees behind their house on Benton Street, saying they’ve done nothing wrong.

I keep catching radio news bites from Kevin Rudd which demonstrate that away from his scriptwriters, the man has a real talent for verbalising bum nuggets.
A few weeks back he was reminiscing on the wireless about his youthful fondness for cricket, admitting he was not much good at the caper. But this was Kev “the greedy farmer forced us to live in a car” dissembling romantically on his youthful past. Thus, he added that he saw his first Test at the Gabba after “jumping the train” down to Brisbane from the Sunshine Coast.
Not “jumping on the train”. No, Kev would again have us believe that his youth was spent in a Steinbeck novel and that he hoboed it on the rattler to Brissie.
Anyone who had anything to do with Queensland railway officials in the 1970s would know that those hard bastards wouldn’t — to paraphrase Jimmy Sharman’s estimate of his doorman — let the wind in without a ticket. And the likelihood of a twerp like Rudd challenging such beasts is unimaginable.
Kev was at it again this morning on 3AW talking 18 carat crap. This time he was referring to something on his procrastination agenda.
“You can’t turn the Queen Mary around overnight,” he opined. Now that’s a slow boat, China.
Perhaps we should have a repository here for Ruddy nonsense. How’s the Kevin Rudd Gilded Lily and Absurdities Collection sound?

The Rudd Government has failed abysmally in its first test of indigenous policy. The government has vowed to return to an apartheid system with an elected ATSIC-style governing body and reintroduction of permits for outsiders to enter tribal lands.
The Australian’s Nicholas Rothwell, easily the giant of indigenous affairs commentary, rightly tears strips off the government and its minister, Jenny Macklin, clearly an 18-carat dud, for dragging policy back to the days of standover merchants and community inertia.

The primary effect of permits has long been to cut off remote Aboriginal societies from the outside world: to hinder economic activity, to kill tourist curiosity, to protect the incompetent administrators and local leaders presiding over their dysfunctional little kingdoms. Permits acted as a coded signal to outsiders, saying: “Leave your usual assumptions behind on entry, because things are different in remote Aboriginal Australia, educational standards are lower, social capital is lower, housing is worse, food is poorer – but that’s all OK, because it’s another kind of society.”
And permits were also a signal to those on remote communities, saying: “You’re too fragile to face the world, you need to be protected and coddled, suspect all strangers, the government will serve as your only help.”
For three decades, this system flourished, and brought with it the results we know: anomie, small-town boredom, drugs, drink, illiteracy, social collapse, illness, early death. It was a significant factor in breeding weak societies, not strong open ones.
Sexual abuse and family violence, the dreadful plagues that formed the pretext for the intervention, are both syndromes that flourish in the shadows. Permits never served to defend communities from these curses, since they were internal, and directly tied to social and housing conditions.
Drug dealers, carpetbaggers and exploiters preying on Aboriginal societies routinely ignored the permit system, which was unenforceable, and hence obeyed only by the law-abiding. This was why Mal Brough, indigenous affairs minister in the Howard government, planned to lift the permit requirement for access to large communities and their central areas, while leaving most private land protected by the system’s safeguards.

Camille Paglia paints a frightening portrait of the harpy who aspires to be the first female leader of the free world.

It’s no coincidence that Hillary’s staff has always consisted mostly of adoring women, with nerdy or geeky guys forming an adjunct brain trust. Hillary’s rumored hostility to uniformed military men and some Secret Service agents early in the first Clinton presidency probably belongs to this pattern. And let’s not forget Hillary, the governor’s wife, pulling out a book and rudely reading in the bleachers during University of Arkansas football games back in Little Rock.
Hillary’s disdain for masculinity fits right into the classic feminazi package, which is why Hillary acts on Gloria Steinem like catnip. Steinem’s fawning, gaseous New York Times op-ed about her pal Hillary this week speaks volumes about the snobby clubbiness and reactionary sentimentality of the fossilized feminist establishment, which has blessedly fallen off the cultural map in the 21st century. History will judge Steinem and company very severely for their ethically obtuse indifference to the stream of working-class women and female subordinates whom Bill Clinton sexually harassed and abused, enabled by look-the-other-way and trash-the-victims Hillary.

You could find excuses for much of this criticised behaviour, woeful as it appears. But reading a book at the football? What an obnoxious snob.

Goodness gracious me. The Indians are ripping through our top order like bad curry — 3/14.
UPDATE:
Finally, Australia’s dominance of world cricket appears to be under real challenge after one of the most action-packed days of Test cricket in which 15 wickets fell for 295 runs.
After only two days, India is 1/52 — a lead of 170 runs — and a hot favourite to win the third Test.
I’m on the second last day of a week’s leave, so the challenge on the home front is to satisfy the Minister for Domestic Works’ demands while paying full attention to what will be an engrossing day’s play. It will be a busy morning.

Gore’s acquisition of Google Inc. to form Google Green back in 2014 is still lamented by some internet purists. Google Green advertisements continue to dominate websites around the world with the familiar Google Green logo. Anti-green demonstrators were sometimes heard outside the conference center chanting “Bring Back Coke”, an obvious reference to Mr. Gore’s central role in co-ordinating the international ban on carbonated drinks in 2016.

Other scoops include Vatican sued over Act of God and More polar bears suffer heat exhaustion.

Air force veterans in these parts don’t just fade away; they get high.

AN 81-year-old World War II veteran and his wife have been convicted of drug trafficking, but have escaped a jail term.
Stanley Hepburn and his wife Gillian, 59, of Bell Park, pleaded guilty in Geelong Magistrates’ Court yesterday to charges of cultivating and trafficking cannabis, the Geelong Advertiser reports.

Yep, there ought to be a law against it. I mean, if it’s allowed to go on unfettered who knows where it could end.

RICHMOND, Va. – It’s one thing to dangle fuzzy dice from a rear view mirror, but decorating a trailer hitch with a large pair of rubber testicles might be a bit much in Virginia.
State Del. Lionel Spruill introduced a bill Tuesday to ban displaying replicas of human genitalia on vehicles, calling it a safety issue because it could distract other drivers.

First reports of a UFO over Texas surfaced a few days ago on small local news sites. Now, the biggies of mainstream media are covering it.

A pilot, policeman and local business owners are among those who insist they have seen a large, silent object with bright lights flying low and fast over the town of Stephenville, 60 miles south west of Fort Worth.
Some said they saw fighter jets chasing the craft, which was mostly spotted on one evening – January 8.

What’s perplexing in these days of the ubiquitous digital camera is how, if dozens of people have reported seeing the mystery craft, not one image has so far surfaced.

UPDATE:
Readers at SFGate are having some fun with this report. My favourite comment: It was L. Ron Hubbard coming back for Tom and Suri and Travolta to save the world! They paid BIG BUCKS for this ride! Yahoooo~!

Excellent news from Tim Blair. The beast is not rampant.
And here is some very interesting information if you’ve been digesting comments in the post below: Tim is aged 42. Hail Tim, he carries the secret of the universe.

Although he sounds like someone out of Monty Python or Douglas Adams’ imagination, some exceptionally sharp minds are paying attention to the Surfer Dude and his new theory of the universe.
Surfer, hiking guide, sometime yurt occupant and theoretical physicist Garrett Lisi has published an online paper in New Scientist entitled “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything”.
The Telegraph says Lisi has high hopes that his new theory could provide what he says is a “radical new explanation” for the three decade old Standard Model, which weaves together three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay.
The reason for the excitement is that Lisi’s model also takes account of gravity, a force that has only successfully been included by a rival and highly fashionable idea called string theory, one that proposes particles are made up of minute strings, which is highly complex and elegant but has lacked predictions by which to do experiments to see if it works.